SingStar Rooms dated for PS Home News

And whoever said home was pointless, eh?

@el_pollo_diablo

Me and about three million other people ;-)

I have a home already and I don't need a fake one.

I've changed my mind. I may use home as soon as they introduce a Vivid exclusive room/area...

I was being sarcastic you know.

Now, if this had Natal support built in, and the dances were actual moves being pulled by people in other living rooms... Then that would be sad and lonely, and cross platform in a way that will never happen.

Instead of investing so much time in Home, which is rather useless and ugly, why not waste more time on a bug-free, non-glittery, non-teeny themed, non-commercial XMB? Oh wait..we had that but now it's gone!

When is Sony going to understand that 99% of PS3 users don't use Home? If I want to Disco I start up Singstar and visit the Doughnuts!

@Xbromber

I think Sony know exactly what %age of PS3 owners use Home and exactly how long they use it for. That's the point. The point of Home is primarily not to provide entertainment to the PS3 owning masses, it's to provide an advertising channel to third parties. Home is not a game, it's a moving billboard. From firms selling t-shirts to advertising themed 'spaces' - who do you think paid for the Red Bull Air Racing space hmmm? - Home is there to provide 'eyeballs' to people to advertise to. I suspect Sony are getting enough eyeballs for enough minutes in home to pay for the service and to provide for some further development. The SingStar space is probably there less for people who like Singstar, as for Sony thinking it might be enough fun that a few people go out and buy SingStar because of it (and the juicy DLC that owning SingStar brings with it).

It would not surprise me if the continuing bill for Home is met entirely by marketing departments and not be the game dev side of things at all.

@jonbwfc
Absolutely right there, it's a marketing environment and one I carefully stay away from. It's amazing how much ads we have to endure nowadays during a normal day. I really long back to the 70s and 80s where we only had public TV without commercial breaks and no internet that spams you every second on every link you follow. Sony is taking the wrong turn here for me and it's doing what puts me so off: follow the leader. Trophies, ads in XMB, 'avatars', gamercards...it's not their invention and they implemented it (poorly) after launch making the PS3 an inconsistent mess with a zillion SKUs and an ugly interface. Where Sony once stood out as cult with classic, brilliant games it's now turned into a commercial, non-consumer-caring copy-cat company. A shame.

"an interactive dancefloor that changes genre and music depending on the dance the avatars choose to do"

So if the users all do the "robot" we get Kraftwerk or something?